Blog

This baby is delicious. OK, time for some news. I must have managed to do something right, because Mrs. IM is pregnant! A few months ago (I’ve been sitting on the news out of a sense of cautious optimism), I came home from work and heard my wife say that one, short, completely life-altering sentence: “I’m pregnant.” Needless to say, my world was [...] Read more

You’ve likely heard about all the benefits of having a Roth IRA, and you want to take advantage of that tax-free growth. But what if you’re a college student working part time, or just started your first job and don’t have the thousands of dollars required to open a Vanguard or Fidelity account? Is it possible to open a Roth IRA with no minimum, [...] Read more

This is a personal story of how much mortgage debt I have and how I acquired it. Ordinarily I do not post numbers about my assets or debts, but I’m comfortable making these known. I don’t necessarily intend for there to be a moral to this story; it’s just an objective tale of how I took on the debt that I still have. You, dear reader, probably [...] Read more

Note: This article is part of an on-going series about Jim, a fun-loving but financially disastrous friend. Let’s see what adventure he has in store today. Today we continue our adventure with Jim, our soon-to-be bankrupt man. Jim is a real person, a friend of mine, though the name is fabricated. It’s been a little while since I last encountered [...] Read more

I’ve been talking to Chuck a lot lately. While I used to be a happy Vanguard customer, that was back before their legal department attacked me for daring to give them free advertising. As I noted in that article, that would be the end of my relationship with Vanguard and the start of a new relationship with Schwab. Adios Vanguard… eventually [...] Read more

OK, it’s time to blow the dust off this blog. Wow, I can’t believe how long it’s been since I wrote a legitimate post. Up until a few months ago, I was working as a college professor at one of the University of Texas campuses. I guess it’s safe to say that life has a way of creating diversions from tasks that I truly enjoy, like writing for this [...] Read more

What’s the most important investment product that you own? Shares of GE? Apple? An index or bond fund? Your house? Nope There’s an investment product out there that’s far more important than any of those. In fact, it’s such a monumental investment that it makes any stock certificate look like a lifeless, meaningless piece of paper (or, um, binary [...] Read more

Mr. IM is back! In the last few months, a lot has happened. When last I posted, I was Mr. IM – homeowner, starving artist, graduate student and teaching assistant at a major university in the Midwest, doing everything I could to keep the bills paid on an embarrassingly low TA salary. When I say low, I mean it: there are people who earn a lot more [...] Read more